"...but the Arabs still couldn't, and didn't, come to grips with the
fact that Israel was not going to accommodate them by disappearing from
the map."

Golda Meir
autobiography.

Aftermath & Analysis

"...I have never had any doubt that the decisive link
in the chain of events which unfolded in 1967 was forged, in both senses
of the word, by the Soviet Union. It is undeniable that Soviet warnings
about imaginary Israeli "troop concentrations" on the Syrian border
prodded Nasser to action. And it is quite impossible that Moscow could have
believed what it was saying. The mobilization of "eleven to thirteen"
Israeli brigades, to say nothing of their concentration in the north, would
have had a conspicuous effect on our national life. The disruption of normality
in so many families would have resounded across the chanceries and newspapers
of the world. Nine months after the 1967 war, at his trial in Cairo, the
former minister of Defense Shamseddin Badran confirmed that "false
Soviet reports" of an imminent Israeli drive for Damascus had caused
Egypt to undertake a policy of confrontation in Sinai. United only by a
common rancor, Moscow, Damascus and Cairo had laid an explosive charge of
falsehood at the foundations of Middle Eastern peace. The wick was to be
three weeks long."

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